Microsoft Has No Plans To Have Azure Data Centers In Every Country

Of course, every country here is just used as rhetoric, but those of you who were expecting Microsoft to aggressively expand Windows Azure physically to all corners of the globe can rest assured it is not on.

Sure, the major markets will have a local presence — United States and Europe in particular.

But there is no sigh of local datacenters in a whole bunch of important locales around the planet anytime soon, at least according to Steven Vidich, the director of Windows Azure marketing. He was speaking at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas.

The story popped up over at Lifehacker, where Steven is quoted as saying:

“We are building and deploying new facilities all the time so we can cover more regions, but we will never have a data centre in every country. If we were to do that it would negate the whole principle of public cloud scale and efficiency.”

Apart from logistics, there are legal issues surrounding the subject. Some users and businesses may have such a need due to a legal perspective, while others may want a local presence for latency requirements.

Windows Azure currently houses customer data and code within four key locations — Asia, Europe, US Central or US Coastal. Customers, obviously, have the ability to specify a particular data center.

Data is also automatically replicated from one location to another for redundancy purposes.